The Swellers -- Making The Video: "Inside My Head"

On Monday we're premiering the new video from The Swellers ... you knew that, right? Anyway, we reached out to the band to get a little bit of information about "behind the scenes" and the making of the new video.

Behind the Video

Let's rewind to our last UK headline tour with Broadway Calls and Into It. Over It. We were sitting around in a dressing room thinking about some ideas for a music video. I sat listening to the song "Inside My Head" over and over again until we started grasping some sort of concept we could run with. I told the guys a really rough idea, they kept adding on, and we had ourselves a video idea.

We hit up our friend Mitch Wojcik who did the artwork/layout for our record Good For Me because we dug his videos for The Wonder Years. He was down to help us make our vision become a reality. The problem was, we had to get a cast full of adults and kids, a location, a permission to do what we wanted in said location. On paper this is much easier said than done. Mainly because we wanted to film this at some sort of elementary school. I hit up a few people I knew from my high school and never received a response (yeah, I cheated on my homework sometimes, now we're even) so we had to come up with a new plan. We were scrambling with less than 2 weeks left to start filming and our friend/one time guitar tech, Dan, told us he'd send an email out to the superintendent of where he went to school. Luckily Dan was a model citizen/student and we got the go ahead from a very enthusiastic fella who gave us full permission to use ANY of the schools we wanted. He even got some kids signed up to act in the video. Thanks Dan.

Time was speeding up so we had to realistically organize everything. We had our trailer packed the night before so we could take it to the school and start filming around 9am. Luckily, there was a FREAK SNOWSTORM that night and our van wouldn't start in the morning. Even better, our van was facing our trailer and blocking it in so we couldn't get that out. It was also too early to call someone to fix it. Nick and I ran around screaming for a while, he went to get jumper cables at the only place that was open... nothing worked. It was very chaotic and cold and we kept screaming because that's how guys resolve issues. Then finally we just gave up and called some friends from the video to bring their cars. We loaded our gear first show style, having a few SUVs pull up and divide everything in them. It definitely saved our b's.

We got to the set a little late but everything ended up on schedule. We realized we're all still pretty bad actors. The girl's color guard or basketball or something... a group of young girls asked if we were a band and had their pictures taken with us. It was really weird because we weren't actually at a show and I guarantee they can't name ONE Black Flag song, you know? Posers. So we kept shooting. Oh yeah, Ryan's birthday was the night before so to put it in PG terms... he was really "tired" during the video and had to "make his food disappear" a few times during the shoot. The kids were really fun and goofy. We split up filming so we could get more scenes done at once... then we were informed we didn't have access to the gym for the rest of the day. Mitch panicked like a little baby while I remained extremely cool and we ended up getting access to Linden Middle School to film the basketball/performance scene. Again, the superintendent saved the day. I never thought I'd respect authority, but today was a new day.

The video was done. We ate pizza. And... over three months later it's about to be released. We couldn't be happier with how it turned out and we're glad we get to share it with you right before we head to overseas to tour with Deaf Havana then come back to the states and go out with The Early November, The Wonder Years and Young Statues. Thanks for your patience. See you on Monday at 1pm Eastern on Absolutepunk.net.